poetry cafe assignment

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Step by Step: Poetry Unit for Elementary Classrooms

Week One of the Poetry Unit Plan – Figurative Language

Week Two – Introduction to Poetry

Engaging Poetry Elements Activity

Fourth Grade Poetry Writing

Weeks Three & Four –Write Original Poetry

More Ideas for Your Poetry Unit Lesson Plans

Creative Writing Prompts

Games to Review Your Poetry Unit

9 Fun Poetry Lessons to Add to Your Next Unit

Poetry Out Loud Lesson Plans

Poetry Writing Lessons

Happy Poetry Writing! It’s such a fun way to expand your students’ writing capabilities, and I hope these poetry lesson ideas help you! And if you’re looking for more ways to engage your students, I’ve got tons of ideas in my free Classroom Community Planner . Download it for free here to keep the fun going after your elementary poetry unit!

• Our Mission

Every Student Can Be a Poet

Five easy-to-implement strategies to make poetry writing accessible and fun for all students.

Each year, when I tell my students that we are going to write poetry, a few are excited, but the majority let out an audible sigh. They often have the misconception that poetry is about following a lot of rules and using words that they don’t understand. They’re more open and excited when the focus shifts toward sharing their ideas and feelings with others in a creative format.

With each new type of poetry I teach, I work through writing a poem with them and talk through my thinking. Showing students that their teacher’s writing is far from perfect and sometimes comes out a lot different than envisioned empowers them to create their own work. I also model the risk-taking of starting a poem and the beauty of improvement through revision.

The poetry-writing process can become more inclusive and engaging when you offer a variety of poetry-writing exercises.

Blackout Poetry

Start with a page from any text and ask students to choose words from that text to create a poem. They black out any words they don’t want in their poem with a marker. They then rewrite all the remaining words into a poem.

Ask students to plan what they want to black out by lightly underlining in pencil before they begin marking through words. The only rule is that they must use these words in the order that they appear.

Students enjoy using texts that seem uninteresting at first glance, such as pages out of discarded grammar books. They love turning something boring into a fun poem.

Blackout poetry is a good starting point for new poets because the words are already on the page and students only need to determine which words to use. This strategy can also be used as an interdisciplinary assignment in which students use text from specific content to create a poem about that content, such as using the Bill of Rights to create a poem about the Revolutionary War.

Word-Scramble Poetry

This strategy begins with a pile of words cut out on individual pieces of paper. They can be specific words chosen by the teacher or words collected from students. Students organize the words to create any poem they would like without adding new words. This strategy allows students to see that there is not a right way to write a poem, and everyone leaves class with a completed poem. When I model this for students, they love to see me moving words around, changing my mind and wishing so much for words that I don’t have.

There are several variations of the word-scamble poetry method. One involves giving all students the same group of words and discovering how many different ideas are formulated using those same words. Another involves giving students different groups of words and allowing them to trade words. A last variation involves a bit of stealing by the teacher: Periodically walk around the classroom and distribute new words or take some words away.

My Life in ___ Words

Students are given the task of writing the story of their life using only the same number of words as their age. This helps students practice word choice and takes a little of the pressure off because it is, by default, a short piece.

A variation of this method is to use a different cap on the number of words that students may use. I’ve asked students to write about a specific topic using fewer than five or 10 words.

Prose to Poetry

Students write out their ideas for a poem without worrying about format. They are encouraged to write freely about whatever emotion or topic they would like to convey in their poem. Then students follow four steps to turn the prose into poetry:

• Decide what emotion or idea is most important for you to convey in your poem, and keep that in mind as you make revisions.
• Cut the word count by at least half by eliminating unneeded words and phrases. Highlight the most important words and phrases that you want to keep and delete the rest.
• Highlight what you think is the most important phrase, and make it your title.
• Rearrange the remaining words and phrases in a way that helps you convey your idea. Consider starting and ending all lines with a noun, adjective, or verb.

My Worst Poem

Ask students to write the worst poem ever about something they feel strongly about. Then have them go through a few revisions, making edits to turn it into something they are proud to share. This takes the pressure off of getting something on paper. Once they get over the stress of what to write and just start writing, they almost always realize that their “worst poem” isn’t that bad at all.

Celebrating Successes

After working through a few of these activities, students often comment on how surprised they are about how many poems they wrote and how much fun they had. I end the unit celebrating their writing with a poetry café, where students share their poems with their classmates and enjoy a few snacks. Creating easy and accessible exercises for poetry writing can turn skeptical students into poets.

13 Poetry Lesson Plans For High School

Teach your students what a poem is as well as all the important information necessary while  teaching poetry, like: vocabulary, sound devices, types of poetry, figurative language, how to analyze a poem, and how to find rhyme scheme.

In this resource, you will receive a packet of graphic organizers/guided notes along with a Powerpoint lesson that teaches the following terminology:

poem, speaker, line, stanza, quatrain, couplet, cinquain, tercet, refrain, symbol, theme, mood

tone, imagery, juxtaposition, oxymoron, pun, paradox, allusion, proverb, foot, iamb, iambic pentameter, enjambment, anaphora, metonymy

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

simile, metaphor, personification, idiom, hyperbole, irony

SOUND DEVICES

rhyme, rhyme scheme, slant rhyme, rhythm, meter, alliteration, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia, repetition

TYPES OF POETRY

narrative, lyrical, haiku, ballad, sonnet, limerick, free verse, acrostic, concrete, blank verse, blues poem, elegy, ode, prose, villanelle

HOW TO ANALYZE A POEM

HOW TO DETERMINE RHYME SCHEME

This resource includes a copy of the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe and 26 close reading questions. The analysis includes an in-depth look at academic vocabulary, poetic devices, and literary elements in the poem. (An answer key is also provided.)

Poetic and Literary Devices Covered in this Activity:

alliteration

• rhyme scheme
• gothic literature

In this  poetry analysis activity,  your students will read and answer questions regarding the famous poem  “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman.  Next, your students will listen to the song  “If I Die Young” by The Band Perry  that carries a similar message. Then, students will take a closer look at how these two texts relate. Comparing and contrasting these paired texts will help your students better understand point of view, tone, mood, and theme! Add music to make poetry fun for students! This resource includes:

• Full text of the poem “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman
• Analysis questions for the poem “To an Athlete Dying Young”
• Song analysis questions based on the lyrics “If I Die Young” by The Band Perry
• Compare and contrast question about the song and poem
• EDITABLE copy of the questions so you can make modifications if needed
• ANSWER KEYS for everything

In this  Paired Texts Poetry Analysis , your students will analyze the two poems:  “An Obstacle” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman & “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas.

This resource includes:

• Full text of “An Obstacle” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Due to copyright law, I am unable to provide a full text of the poem “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas)
• Graphic Organizer that closely examines both poems for: meaning, tone, figurative language, setting, imagery, and theme (PDF)
• Answer key for poem analyses
• Constructed Response task which requires students to develop an answer in paragraph form. (The first CR question asks students to compare the themes in each poem. The second CR question requires students to personally connect with the theme.)
• Editable copy (word document) of the poetry analysis graphic organizer

As your students watch the 1989 Film  Dead Poets Society  (directed by Peter Weir), have them answer these  film analysis questions  to help them better comprehend and understand the film’s meaning and purpose. Additionally, have them personally connect to the theme of the film by  writing their own free verse poem  in response to Walt Whitman’s poem “O Me! O Life!” The film is 2 hours and 8 minutes in length.

Included in this lesson:

• 22 Comprehension and Analysis questions based on the film  “ Dead Poets Society” — these questions require students to connect to the characters in the film and use inferencing skills
• Answer key to the film’s analysis questions
• Free Verse Writing Activity: prompt and rubric in response to Walt Whitman’s poem “O Me! O Life!”
• Editable copy of the lesson for teachers to make modifications if needed

Teach your students all about  Sonnets  with a unique analysis of  William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138.

1) First, use the Powerpoint presentation to familiarize your students with:

• Sonnet definition and structure
• Shakespearean Sonnets
• Petrarchan Sonnets
• Spenserian Sonnets
• Miltonic Sonnets
• Iambic pentameter
• Two-part thematic Structure
• Rhyme Scheme

Guided notes worksheet included!

2) Then, have your students analyze Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 by answering comprehension and literary analysis questions. Answer key included!

3) Lastly, have your students  write their own original Shakespearean Sonnet . Directions and guidelines included.

Students will read and  analyze the famous poem by John Keats, “Ode On A Grecian Urn.”  This resource is great for any poetry unit!

This lesson includes:

• Full text of the poem “Ode On A Grecian Urn”
• 14 Questions about the poem: a mix of comprehension and literary analysis questions
• Write Your Own Ode Poem Activity for Students (Directions and Requirements)
• EDITABLE Word Document so you can make modifications if you wish to

Teach your students all about  Blackout Poetry with this fun lesson and activity!

In this resource, you will receive:

• Teacher Guide
• Powerpoint lesson on Blackout Poetry with step by step directions for students to create their own blackout poems in a variety of ways
• 10 Examples of blackout poems
• 40 Pages of printable texts your students can use to make their own poetry
• Editable word document Rubric and Prompt for students

In this  High School Poetry Packet , your students will read, study, and analyze six famous poems! Perfect for any Poetry Unit!

This packet is a wonderful tool because you can have students complete the literary analysis questions in a variety of ways: whole-class, independently, or collaboratively.

The 6 poems included in this packet are:

• Sonnet V by Shakespeare
• “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost
• “I’m happiest when most away” by Emily Brontë
• “The Tyger” by William Blake
• “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be” by John Keats
• “If” by Rudyard Kipling

In this packet, students will work on poetry skills such as: rhyme scheme, rhyme, imagery, assonance, consonance, caesura, anaphora, alliteration, theme, tone, mood, personification, enjambment, connotation, and more.

Your students are going to love this  Poetry Digital Escape Room!  Students will read and analyze the poem  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost.

They will solve puzzles in this peaceful scene of snowy woods, glistening mountaintops, and a beautiful, serene frozen lake. In this  360°  digital escape room, students will try to escape the woods before the sun goes down! This activity is designed to work for a laptop, tablet, or smart phone.

This game requires reading comprehension strategies, knowledge of poetic devices, and critical thinking skills. Watch the preview video and see exactly what’s inside the digital escape room!

Included in this download are teacher instructions, student instructions (digital), the master lock graphic organizer, answer keys, the full text of the poem, and a reflection sheet (optional).

Assign your students  a one pager poetry analysis project  and have your students share their understanding of ANY POEM by imaginatively blending their written ideas with colorful images from the text. You can pick one poem for your whole class to use or have all your students pick their own individual poems! Students’ artwork make for unique and creative analyses of the literature and also make great bulletin boards!

Included in this purchase is:

• Student directions for the one pager project
• Rubric for the one pager project
• Example one pager (based on the poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas)
• 10 BLANK TEMPLATES (printable — optional)
• EDITABLE word document so teachers can modify instructions or rubric

Students are encouraged to include several of these literary devices, poetic devices (sound devices), and figurative language elements into their final projects: metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, imagery, pun, oxymoron, paradox, idiom, allusion, symbolism, assonance, consonance, alliteration, anaphora, rhyme, rhyme scheme, repetition, onomatopoeia, cacophony, mood, tone, and theme.

This resource includes a  Poetry Assessment for high school  students (9th-12th grade ELA). You will receive a printable PDF copy of the test as well as an  EDITABLE  word document in case you would like to make modifications. A detailed answer key is also included!

The format of this test includes:

• 10 fill-in-the-blank questions with a word bank
• 8 matching questions with poem types
• 5 matching questions with sound devices
• 7 matching questions with figurative language
• A poetry analysis of two poems:  “A Psalm of Life”  by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the Sonnet  “Death, be not proud”  by John Donne.
• Students will answer 5 multiple choice questions regarding each poem
• 1 constructed response where students will compare the themes of each poem in a minimum of two fully developed paragraphs

(41 questions in total including the written response)

The Poetry Test covers the following literary terms:

narrative poem

lyrical poem

onomatopoeia

personification

Have your students create a collaborative poster and learn about  William Shakespeare  in a fun and engaging way!

Your students will create an author biography by researching Shakespeare and establishing his profile on a poster.

Students will learn about Shakespeare and his body of work as an influential author.

Additionally, they will learn the importance of collaboration and effective communication. This project is perfect for   National Poetry Month.

Project Steps:

1) To construct the author study poster, your students will work in groups to conduct research on Shakespeare.

2) Students will then transfer their findings to boxes on the poster.

3) Next, they will work together to color or paint the pieces of the poster.

4) Lastly, students will tape together the final product.

The poster is made up of six pieces of paper, which can be printed on regular copy paper or card stock.

Once taped together, the final product will be  28″ x 15″  and can last a lifetime if you laminate it!

This resource includes the following:

• Step by Step Student Directions (PDF & editable word document)
• Author Study Project Rubric (PDF & editable word document)
• Author Study Graphic Organizer for Students (PDF & editable word document)
• 6 Blank Coloring Pages that come together as one beautiful poster (PDFs)
• William Shakespeare Author Study Answer Key
• Example of Final Project: Completed Text & Fully Colored Body

Check out more from my LITERARY LEGENDS Collection:

• Emily Dickinson
• Langston Hughes
• George Orwell
• Robert Frost
• Walt Whitman

This resource is a  FULL POETRY UNIT for High School English, Grades 9-12!

You will get a collection of various lessons, activities, and projects, plus an awesome digital escape room, and final test! I’ve also included a schedule for teachers to follow day-by-day! This bundle is so diverse and your students will read at least 18 different poems within this unit!

Included in this  high school poetry unit bundle:

• Introduction Poetry Lesson & Guided Notes
• The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe Poem Close Reading
• To an Athlete Dying Young by A. E. Housman & Song Comparison Activity
• Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night & An Obstacle Paired Texts Analysis
• Dead Poets Society Movie Guide & Free Verse Poem Writing
• Sonnet 138 William Shakespeare, Sonnet Lesson & Writing Activity
• Ode On A Grecian Urn | Poem by John Keats & Ode Writing Activity
• Blackout Poetry Lesson and Creative Art Project
• Poetry Packet: Analysis of 6 Poems
• Poetry Digital Escape Room using Robert Frost Poem
• Poetry One-Pager for ANY POEM
• Editable Poetry Test with Answer Key
• William Shakespeare Author Study: Collaborative Poster Project!
• Teacher guide with day by day schedule for 4 weeks of Poetry

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Browse Course Material

Course info.

• Prof. Mary Fuller

Departments

As taught in.

• American Literature

Learning Resource Types

Reading poetry, assignments, session 1: recognizing patterns.

• Pound, Ezra. “ In a Station of the Metro .” In Personae . New Directions, 1990. ISBN: 9780811211383.

Write up a roughly 300 word introduction of yourself especially as in terms of your relationship with poetry. What is your background: prior knowledge, authors or works you like, don’t like or are curious about, good and bad experiences, things you’d like to learn or talk about in the class, things you know from other disciplines (linguistics!) that might be useful.

Session 2: Making Poetry in English

Print out the readings, mark them up, and bring with you to class next week. The assignment below gives questions to think about as you read the poems.

Assignment: Prose to Poetry

Session 3: From Evidence to Analysis

• William Shakespeare, “ Sonnet 116 .” Poetry Foundation.
•  Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets . Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 113-115. ISBN: 9780674637122. [Preview with Google Books .]

Read the sonnet (multiple times) and Vendler’s analysis. Come with questions.

Assignment : Informal Essay I

Session 4: Etymologies and Rhythms

Make a copy of the readings, mark them up, and bring with you to class next week. In the process, please glance at the poets’ bios and make a note of where and when they lived and any key facts—just the basics!

Assignment: Poetry Analysis I

Assignment: Etymologies and Rhythms

Session 5: Language as System(s)

• Dizikes, Peter. “ From Contemporary Syntax to Human Language’s Deep Origins .” MIT News Office . June 11, 2014.
• Dizikes, Peter. “ The Writing on the Wall .” MIT News Office . February 21, 2018.
• Sun, Jessica. “ Where Did Language Come From? ” Feb. 4, 2018. YouTube.
• Miyagawa, Shigeru, Robert Berwick, and Kazou Okanoya. “ Emergence of Structure .” Frontiers Research Foundation, 2013.

Read enough to get an idea about Miyagawa’s two major research projects.

Come up with questions to ask Miyagawa in class about:

• The research (points of clarification, but also why these projects, how did they come about, how are they finding evidence—anything is fair game).
• Language in general, from a linguist’s point of view (How do you make a sentence out of words? What is a sentence? How do we know where to put stress on words or syllables? Etc.).
• Issues with translation between languages. How different are human languages from each other, anyway?

Session 6: The Shape of Sentences and the Shape of Information

We’re going from words to sentences and looking at some more cool poems. Take a look at the class notes for session 6 (PDF - 1.2MB) .

Assignment: The Shape of Sentences

Assignment : Informal Essay II

Session 7: Reading Line Breaks

• Wordsworth, William. “ A Slumber did my Spirit Seal .” Poetry Foundation.
• Brooks, Gwendolyn. “ We Real Cool .” In The Bean Eaters . Literary Licensing, 2012. ISBN: 9781259274481. 
• Williams, William Carlos. “ The Red Wheelbarrow .” In The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939 . New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1991. ISBN: 9780811211871. 
• Williams, William Carlos. “ Poem (“As the Cat”) .” Poetry . July, 1930.
• Schussler, Jennifer. “ The Forgotten Man Behind William Carlos William’s ‘Red Wheelbarrow’. ” New York Times . July 6, 2015.
• Eliot, T.S. “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock .” In Collected Poems 1909-1962 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. ISBN: 9780151189786.
•  Eliot, T.S. “ Reflections on Vers Libre .” In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot Edited by Frank Kermose. Harvest Books, 1975. ISBN: 9780156806541. 

This week, the poems are mostly short and very spare, so that we can really bear down on the phenomenon of what it does to end a line (but not a sentence). Consider this: line breaks affect the rate at which information is delivered. Sometimes (as in the Wordsworth poem) they seem to contain their own information.

There is also some brief prose reading.

• Eliot’s comments will help you think about how to describe rhythm in poems that are not uniformly metrical, and you should find it useful to hear how a practitioner thinks about it. 
• Since you’ll be meeting Tyehimba Jess, let’s start hearing what he has to say.
• Williams’ poems are about as stripped down as Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” so it’s interesting to read an article that fills in what he was seeing and gives us some context. What can we do with the information?

Session 8: Fixed Forms, Rhymed and Otherwise

This week’s poems are fixed forms : forms with tight constraints on variables like number of lines, meter, line-length, rhyme, or line ending words. First, sonnets: by three sixteenth century authors participating in the vogue of writing long sequences of sonnets devoted to (mostly) unrequited love, and then by four twentieth century authors who use the form to different ends. Second, villanelles: another poem by Bishop, and one by Martha Collins (a wonderful poet who lives hear Harvard Square). Finally, a poem that invents a new form, initially as a tribute to Brooks and now used by other writers. Hayes has a weekly column in the NYT Magazine featuring a poem by someone else that he likes with a few sentences about why; if this tickles your fancy, check it out.

Assignment: Poetry Analysis II

Assignment: Sonnets and Rhythm

Assignment : Informal Essay III

Session 9: New Work in Computer-Generated Poetry

•  Montfort, Nick.  Truelist.  Counterpath, 2017. ISBN: 9781933996639.

Rather than ask that they read particular section or sections of The Truelist, I’d like to have each person in the class engage with several aspects of the project:

• The printed book (they don’t have to buy it, but read some from it, see the material artifact).
• The program that generated the book-length poem .
• My complete studio recording of the book .

If people want to read it all, of course, or read a few sections, that’s great.

Session 10: Sound Patterns and Sense

Take a look at the class notes for session 10 (PDF - 1.3MB) .

You know most of the drill (poems, poets, annotate). In a previous session, we looked at poems characterized by end-rhymes organized in predictable patterns. Today, we’re going to broaden the optic on repeated sounds. I would like you to look hard at either assonance and consonance (repeated vowel or consonant sounds) in the sonnet, or track the pattern of rhyming sounds especially but not exclusively at the end of lines in Herbert. It might be useful to know that Herbert was a clergyman (that is, he would have worn a collar, which becomes a sign of both the religious vocation and its demands for certain kinds of personal sacrifices). “Collar” is also a homonym of (sounds identical to) “choler,” an older word for “anger,” and this other word invoked by sound is also relevant.

Andrew Marvell was a contemporary of Milton’s; this short poem is among a number by this poet written in the persona of a mower (that is, a laborer who cut grass)—for reasons again having to do with poetic traditions of writing in the voice of “simple people” who worked with the natural world. Sylvia Plath is the only 20th poet in the reading. Coincidentally, the New York Times published an obituary for her today, part of a project to redress important and systemic omissions in their record. The bio on Poetry Foundation is probably more relevant for us, but here is the extended NYT piece if it interests you. 

Assignment: Poetry Analysis III

Session 11: Reading a Difficult Poem (1)

Assignment: Difficult Poem (Group Project and Presentation)

Assignment : Essay Revision

Session 12: Reading a Difficult Poem (2)

Some takeaways from our discussion of “The Waste Land,” parts 1-3:

The poem links together myth and its own historical moment.

Myth: the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King—guardian of the Holy Grail, wounded and impotent because of a transgression at his court. While the king is wounded, the kingdom is infertile—they are waiting for rescue.

History: the moment is Europe after World War I—recovering not only from the material shocks and losses of a massive war, but the sense that an earlier political and social order was revealed to be bankrupt. No sense of agency for “fixing” the predicament, prospects for renewal not yet evident. Passion is dead, prophecy fraudulent, the living are almost dead, and the reader is also implicated in this situation.

At both high and low levels of society, relations between men and women have been thrown into crisis. In “Game of Chess,” no way out of a room that is stifling and artificial. Traumatized man is unable to use his voice, woman speaks only in imperatives, conversation is repetitive and seems to go nowhere. In the pub, a sense of being trapped, silenced, used up, abandoned. Loss of generative connections between human beings; a toxic environment.

This world is devoid of new meanings, and relies on scavenging scraps from the past. Conventional poetic forms highlight how much the present has declined from the past. Every rule violation is possible, but none are shocking—all is desensitized. Human behavior becomes mechanical while machines take on a threatening agency; language decays almost to the point of meaninglessness. Can the scavenged scraps be used to form a picture? Is there the possibility of a new design?

Assignment : Difficult Poem (Report on “The Waste Land”)

Session 13: How Do Metaphors Work?

We’ll be exploring the territory opened up by (for instance) the “if there were water” passage in Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: imaginative, counterfactual, and figurative language, aka, everything that is not being directly observed or declared to be so, aka, what’s in the poem that would not be in a photograph.

Assignment : Metaphors

Session 14: Guest Lecture: Tyehimba Jess

•  Jess, Tyehimba.  Olio . Wave Books, 2016. pp. 12-29. ISBN: 9781940696201.

DuBois, W.E.B. “ Of Spiritual Strivings of the Negro People .” Chapter 1, of Souls of Black Folk .  CreateSpace, 2017. ISBN: 9781505223378.

A few weeks ago, we looked briefly at a corona of sonnets from Olio, written in the voice of the Fiske Jubilee Singers. These are distributed throughout the book, and they serve as punctuation between its sections. Each of these sonnets appears on a page with banners above and below listing the names of black churches where violence occurred, with a date.

Now we’ll read two extended sections from Olio, each centered on the historical figure of a particular musician: Thomas Wiggins, a blind pianist who performed while in slavery, and Sissieretta Jones, a soprano whose career took off in the early twentieth century. (Both are in Olio’s character list, and you can discover more at BlackPast .) As you may suspect from reading these two sections as well as the “Double Shovel,” each section of the book does something a little (or a lot) different with form, even while following the career of a historical person.

You’ll see poems in two voices, poems connected to each other by first and last lines, sonnets, free verse, transcripts of archival documents, and prose poems (that may not be an exhaustive list!). But Olio has some unifying interests across this virtuoso display of formal mastery. One is the set of ideas linking masking, persona, double-consciousness, double voices that you’ve seen in “Double Shovel” (and will also see in the two sections for today). Another is the set of ideas associated with freedom and constraint or bondage, as historical facts, artistic choices, imaginative experiences. Like many poets before him, Jess is interested in the conditions of making art, something that never happens in a vacuum. Music—the literal subject of this book—has since ancient times been a metonymy for poetry. So we are reading both a poetic documentary about history and a meditation on how to have, find, and use an authentic voice. Let’s use this class to identify some questions to ask the poet on Friday.

Session 15: How Does Allusion Work? (History)

Assignment: Poetry Analysis IV

Session 16: Guest Lecture: Charles Shadle

• Shadle, Charles. “ Six Dickinson Songs (PDF - 2.3MB) .” Courtesy of Charles Shadle. Used with permission.

Charles Shadle is a prolific and talented American composer who teaches advanced music theory and composition at MIT; he’ll be talking about six short poems by the 19th c. poet Emily Dickinson—a contemporary of Walt Whitman’s (and of the Civil War)—which he scored for soprano and clarinet. Interpretation of poetry takes many forms, and this is one of them—which will focus us quite a bit on sound and on hearing/voicing as interpretation, as well as on ideas about choice of texts and how the composer (and performers) understand them.

Dickinson’s poems may remind you, in some ways, of Shakespeare’s sonnets: they are at the same time general, private, and elliptical—that is, they are focused closer to the level of the self than the level of public or civic discourse, and largely work with vivid figures rather than objective description. At the level of form, they are radically innovative in ways it took decades for audiences to come to terms with, experimenting with syntax, rhyme, and punctuation; at the level of material production, Dickinson worked almost exclusively in manuscript, allowing her to create her own forms of punctuation, provide alternative versions of a line in a single final draft version, and to exert complete control over the appearance, order—and readership—of her work. The paper booklets considered as Dickinson’s final versions are held at Harvard’s Houghton Library. (The 18th century poet William Blake makes for an interesting comparison: Blake’s radical political and artistic vision led him to self-publish books that integrated text and visual art, each hand-colored by the poet).

Session 17: Guest Lecture: Kimberly Brown

•  Clifton, Lucille.  The Book of Light . Copper Canyon Press, 1992. pp. 11-13, 44-47. ISBN: 9781556590528.

Emily Dickinson lived in Amherst, MA, and attended the precursor of Mt. Holyoke. Our guest speaker, Kimberly Brown, is a professor of English and Africana Studies at Mt. Holyoke, as well as an MLK Fellow in Literature and WGS at MIT. Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) is her favorite poet. The NYT review of Clifton’s collected works comments that “[h]er verse was spare, plainspoken and shorn of rhyme, so much so that when she placed the words “salt” and “fault” together in one poem in the late 1980s, she was moved to warn readers of this potential speed bump by titling it “Poem With Rhyme in It.” Those qualities may have led one anonymous reader on Amazon to comment that she was “our modern-day Emily Dickinson.”

Session 18: Guest Lecture: Martha Collins, Translating Poetry

• Collins, Marth and Kevin Prufer, eds. Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries. Graywolf Press, 2017. pp. 71–75, 163–167. ISBN: 9781555877824. 

Assignment: Analytic Essay

Sessions 19–23: Student Presentations 

Assignment : Final Presentation Report

Analytic Essay

Your best work for this class has combined close observation of evidence with a coherent narrative about how the poem works and produces meaning; anyone could read such an essay and feel they have heard new layers of meaning that give the work more resonance and make experiencing it more satisfying and engaging. That’s really how to think about the work of writing about poetry: be a welcoming and trustworthy guide to other readers.

This essay focuses on one of the poems we’ve read this month—your choice—with one additional element.

For essays on either flavor of this assignment, please provide a title that is not the title of the poem, but gives some idea of your interpretation, the questions you address, or what you find most interesting about the work.

The essay should be 4 pages (roughly 1000 words).

A: Frost, “Birches”; Hughes, “Harlem”; Cohen, “Lit”; Pardlo, “Double Dutch”; Jess, work from “Olio”; Trethewey, “Incident.”

For essays about the poems in A, I’d like you to incorporate something that the poet has said about poetry in general, or his or her work in particular, that seems useful or relevant to you in understanding the poem. If you’re working on Olio, you may have notes of your own. For the other poets, try these resources:

• Frost, Robert. “Comment on Birches.” [preview with Google Books ]
• “ Education by Poetry ,” Amherst Alumni Council address, November 15, 29.
• On music, style and dreams deferred .
• “ Breaking Bubbles .”
• “ Cave Canems 20th Anniversary ,” a background on an organization that formed a “home for black poetry.”
• On syncopated sonnets at TedXNashville.
• “ The Language is Constructing our Ideas More Than We are Deploying the Language ”, an interview with Gregory Pardlo in which he talks about improvisation vs. form, April, 2017.
• Interview with Gregory Pardlo, July 10, 2015; Pardlo talks about the role of conventions and talks about the idea of the “difficult” poem.
• More interviews on Pardlo’s website .
• “ Contributer Interview: Andrea Cohen (2011) ,” Cohen on humor, influences, diction, and more.
• “ Poetry Breaks: What Poetry Is .”
• “ Poetry Breaks: Where Ideas Come From .”
• A 2007 interview with Mosaic .
• On metaphorical language and more.
• On geography and the American South .
• On the “ruthlesseness” of viewing the world as a poet , as well as the role of photography.
• On photography and more .
• On repetition and the layering of images .

B: Lowell, “For the Union Dead”; Pardlo, “For Which It Stands.”

For essays about the two poems above, I’d like you to incorporate information about a couple of the poem’s important allusions (condensed references to external places, events, texts, and so on), for which a more complete understanding of something briefly referenced in the poem expands our understanding of what it says. This is one of the only times I will encourage you to use Google, at least as a place to start!

Read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” We have linked to a hypertext edition of the text that comes with notes.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land . W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. ISBN: 9780393974997.

Group Project and Essay

The assignment for each group will be to take one assigned section of the poem, identify some passages that seem of particular interest or importance, and prepare to lead a discussion centered on those passages for 20–30 minutes of next class. We will look together at the last two sections of the poem and each group should be prepared to make an argument (claims backed up by evidence, perhaps related to the sections you worked on) about how these concluding sections should be understood.

Begin by reading the whole poem, preferably without stopping to look anything up, maybe even out loud—just hear it. If anything strikes you, highlight it as something to come back to. Look up the things you need to look up or check on the second or third reading. (And notice that some of the footnotes in the annotated version will be Eliot’s own.)

I would suggest that each group member pick a passage that interests you (say, 10–20 lines, more if you want, but not much more). Share with your group, comment on each other’s passages—questions, thoughts, votes—and try to converge around the passages you would like to bring into class. Whatever your process, you should memorize at least five lines from your section of the poem.

Come into class prepared to talk about your ideas, raise questions, and lead a discussion. Use (or don’t use!) any kinds of presentation tools you think will be helpful, but that shouldn’t be the point of the exercise. This is your time, and your chance at working together with the tools we’ve developed and your own analytic skills on a famously difficult and memorable and compelling poem. It’s not necessary to explain or claim to understand everything about “The Waste Land.” Sometimes simply describing an opaque passage can prove very helpful; ditto asking the kinds of questions about syntax, lexical levels, sound, rhythm, and other irregularities and irregularities that we’ve been talking about over the last few weeks. These are areas where I’m very confident you can come up with some truly interesting and original insights; the same is not true for the poets’ biography or historical context. (Sorry, but that kind of work has its own challenges and it’s not what we’re setting up to do at this moment).

Finally, keep your notes as the basis for a five page essay to be worked up in the future (and after an expansion and revision of one of your three short papers).

Report on “The Waste Land”

This paper should have two parts (which don’t have to be rhetorically unified—just draw a line!): 1–1.5 pp. report of process of your presentations (how your group approached working on the poem, what you yourself did and tried to do with the poem, anything you might do differently); 3.5–5 pp. on your findings. (The essay as a whole should be roughly 5 pages or 1300–1700 words).

The second part of the paper should look more like the revision you just completed than like the short reports. How does your section of the poem work (give an overview), and what kinds of conclusions can you how reach about it? With those insights in hand, what kinds of larger observations, questions, or arguments are you led to about the poem more broadly? It’s appropriate to register your level of certainty or uncertainty about any conclusions; and as always, to credit others in your group or the class (etc.) whose ideas helped advance your thinking, as well as to footnote outside sources.

General quality control: when you are writing about a piece of literature, imagine that what you writing should make sense to someone who has also read the poem but does not have the text in front of them. So you will need to quote text that you want the reader to think about or notice things about, and you should also give enough context that the reader can place the quotation—both locally (what’s happening, who’s speaking, etc.) and more generally (where are we in the section—early, late, in a long para, a single line fragment—etc.). Best practice is usually to quote a phrase rather than isolated words (esp. words of different kinds), and make sure the grammar of that phrase is clear.

Here I’m quoting an entire line, but in a way that’s unclear and confusing because the syntax is incomplete—and context is missing:

     “In section 1, it says ‘My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled.’”

This would be better:

     “Early in section 1, a cosmopolitan aristocrat named ‘Marie’ recalls a visit to ’the archduke’s, my cousin’s’ house, when ‘he took me out on a sled, and I was frightened.’”

I’m adding in the next line, about her reaction, because it begins to suggest the emotional tone of the memory and thus why it is significant to the character and thus the poem.

Take one of your three short papers, on the formal patterns and other objective features of the poem your chose, and shape it into a more formal, 1500 word essay.

A good literature essay asks, and attempts to answer, some interesting questions about the text, and does so using ample textual evidence. Textual evidence is the term of art for the kinds of observations we’ve been making over the last several weeks about our poems: what the poem says and doesn’t say, its patterns of sound, rhythm, and syntax (along with the way these may or may not synchronize with each other), lineation, word choice and lexical levels, verb forms, things that are made present vs. things whose ideas are invoked by figurative language, and so on. Now you get to think about what it all means, what it adds up to, for what kinds of conclusions can it serve as evidence, how it might be useful in talking about a “big picture” view of the poem. From the other direction, you could think of your job as framing an interesting question about the poem for which the evidence you have helps to provide an answer. I think of this process as making a mosaic—finding a way to place the different pieces I have such that the outline of something can emerge.

Now that I’ve said “outline,” a few words about structure. I would highly recommend two practices: outline your draft as you go, and be willing to reconsider, if necessary, the sequence in which you make your points. The first will help in doing the second, and is also good practice for disciplines in which “reading an article” really means, scanning the section headings.

As you work, continue to pay close attention to what the poem says, both directly and by inference. Please stay away from generalizations (“throughout history, human beings have…,” “Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers in English”), from information I can find for myself on Wikipedia, and from subjective observations that can’t be solidly linked to evidence in the poem. Consider, if only provisionally, the hypothesis that poets say exactly what they mean to say, rather than trying to say something obscurely in verse that might be said more clearly and effectively in prose. (Prose may shape our reading habits, and create certain kinds of expectations that might lead us to feel that way). It’s always worth trying to paraphrase especially difficult or mystifying sections, as a discovery exercise.

In going from “report” to “essay,” you should cut back on the first person and on narrative about your own process (of course, you can walk the reader through a process of coming to understand the poem but you should know where it’s heading). So for instance, a report might very legitimately have content like this: “I don’t see a rhyme scheme… Actually, now I can see the poem does have one.” In the essay, you’d want to do something like this: “the poem’s regular rhyme is subtle enough that we may not hear it at first.” Also be prepared to prune evidence observed in version one that ends up not being critical to the analysis (e.g., “like other sonnets, this one is written in iambic pentameter.”)

A quick word on introductions and conclusions: the job of the conclusion is to step back, review the questions, the evidence, and the argument, and say, “what do I now know? How confident am I? And what do I not know?” The introduction should be the last thing you write. It should be written from the perspective of already knowing everything the essay will say, which is simply not possible until you have said it. It can do some basic orientation about what the poem is and is about, very briefly; and it should set up for the reader the kind of direction you’re going to take in the essay. Without giving away your most interesting conclusions, make the reader curious about what they will be.

 Steele, Timothy. All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter & Versification. Ohio University Press, 1999. pp. 1–51.  ISBN: 9780821412602.

Reading Exercises

• Steele alludes a couple of times in the introduction to how the English language has changed over time, and we’ll talk this week about a few relevant consequences. Basic fact—an earlier Germanic language (Old English, aka Anglo-Saxon) got mashed up with French at the time of the Norman conquest, 1066. By the 1300s these had merged into a new language—Middle English—by time of Shakespeare in 1500s, things had settled down into modern English. Why do we care? Because the two largest sources of English words, Old English and French/Latin, provide us with words that sound different, have different rhythms, and just feel different even when they mean the same things. If you want to pin down the particular sound or tone of a given poem, looking at the sources of its words gives you something objective to go on.
• Beowulf opening lines in Old English | Beowulf text
• Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf text | Seamus Heaney reading Beowulf | Intro to Beowulf (read part 2)
• Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales read aloud | General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Lines 1-18  
• To build on our conversation about meter, you have “meter exercises” that will ask you to make two lists and write two sentences in different metrical patterns with the components suggested. Meter Exercises (PDF)

Final Presentation Report

Your final essay, like the previous “report on a difficult poem” assignment, should be based on your work for the group presentation, and has three elements. You can separate them with lines, or try to integrate; probably 1 should be the longest, then 2, then 3.

1. Analysis

You’ve had some experience now with writing detailed observations and analysis of texts, and I’ll expect these to play some role in your report. This report is also an opportunity to incorporate insights developed in class into a more organized form of argument, or to be more expansive about things you didn’t have the chance to talk about in the presentation. It is up to you how you balance between overview (“Dylan as an artist”) and close analysis of text (“the closing lines of OCD”); but think carefully about the most compelling mix, and make sure that your claims and observations about the specifics of the works you discuss are carefully linked to lines/moments that can serve as evidence and give some precision and focus to what you say. (Quote the text; reference video clips with minute:second; make sure to provide the particular AV material you’re referencing). Put the reading, question-asking, and synthesizing skills you developed to work on this material that you picked out.

2. So what?

This time, you don’t need to offer an account of the group’s process, although feel free to add any observations that occur in the context of talking about the material; what I’d like to ask instead is that you give a sense of why this group of works attracted your group’s attention, and merited the attention of the class. I’m not asking for a defense of aesthetic value (“these poems are as good as Shakespeare’s/ should be on the syllabus of every literature class/etc.”) but rather for your take on what we learn about when we learn about this work.

3. Your work.

You’ll have a chance in subject evaluations to rate the class and say (anonymously) what did and didn’t work—this feedback is almost always useful, and always read, at least by me. Here, though, let’s get celebratory: what would you give yourself credit for learning over the course of this semester? What was the thing you understood that you would be most excited to teach or pass on to someone else?

5–6 pp., 1500–1800 words.

There are three informal essays due throughout the term. They should be 3 pages. See the calendar for details on dates.

Here’s what I’m looking for in the short paper. In these first few weeks of the class, we’re focusing on various objective features of poems:

• patterns of rhythm
• patterns of sound
• patterns of syntax (the grammar of sentences)
• kinds of words
• kinds of images
• kinds of lines

Ultimately, this kind of examination of the poem as a formally shaped linguistic artifact underpins larger understandings of what it says, what it does, and the aesthetic or emotional effects it produces. But right now, I want you to stay in information-gathering mode.

Pick one of the poems that we will have read by the due date of this paper, and record everything you are able to observe about the poem—from class discussion and your own examination. It’s fine to have intuitions and responses, and good to record them, even to transform them into questions (“there is something strange about this line—what makes it stand out?”). But try not to have a thesis—as Bunk says on “The Wire,” have “soft eyes.” Detail and precise description are more important.

Obviously, this is not a formal essay; think of it as a combination of a blog and a lab report. You’re writing up the results of questions you have asked about the poem. You’ll need to make sure that you have a way to describe clearly and precisely what you’re observing, and you’ll need to find some kind of shape for what you write. (For instance, a sequence of questions that you’ve asked). A final sentence or paragraph detailing the 3–5 most interesting things you noticed would be a plus, but since you aren’t making an argument, you won’t need a conclusion!

Frost, Robert. “ Birches .” In The Poetry of Rober Frost . Henry Holt and Co., 1979. ISBN: 9780805005028.

Hughes, Langston. “ Harlem .” In Selected Poems of Langston Hughes . Vintage Classics, 1990. ISBN: 9780679728184.

Pardlo, Gregory. “ Double Dutch .” In Totem . The American Poetry Review, 2007. ISBN: 9780977639533.

Cohen, Andrea. “ Lit .” The New Yorker. February 16, 2015.

Dunbar, Paul “ We Wear the Mask .” In The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar . Dodd, CreateSpace, 2017. ISBN: 9781475157574.

 Jess, Tyehimba. “Booker-Washington Double Shovel.” In  Olio . Wave Books, 2016. ISBN: 9781940696201.

• The two parts of metaphor are generally designated as tenor , or thing meant (“I”), and vehicle , or thing identified with (“the walrus”).
• Langston Hughes’ poem (not unlike Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee…”) considers a series of different similes for understanding of how a temporal process will unfold: think about what each one offers and the domains from which the vehicles of these comparisons are drawn. (These are both tight, short poems that are also worth thinking about in light of many of the formal questions we’ve been exploring—but I’ll focus on their figures of speech).
• To notice in Pardlo’s poem: domains from which comparisons are drawn (and what do these tell us about the object described); when he uses simile, and when metaphor (mark these up on your copy!).
• To notice in Frost’s poem: all this and when the poem shifts from describing something observed to describing something not observed, but imagined.
• Finally, Jess’s poem builds on Dunbar’s metaphor of wearing a mask as a way of talking about double consciousness (and this idea of doubleness is important in his book as a whole). There is more complexity in this poem and its multiple versions than I find easy to talk about here, but let’s at least begin exploring.

Bishop, Elizabeth “ At the Fishhouses .” In  The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. ISBN: 978037451872.

Heaney, Seamus. “ Digging .” In Death of a Naturalist . Faber and Faber, 2006. ISBN: 9780571230872.

Moore, Marianne. “ The Fish .” Poets.org.

Things to mark up/questions to ask when you read a poem:

• Are there regularities in line length?
• What controls or motivates the end of a line?
• If yes, are there places of important variation in pattern or emphasis?
• Are units of meaning (phrases and sentences) aligned with units of meter, so lines end with punctuation—or not?
• Are there places that stand out as different?
• What places and times exist in the poem?
• Where? “offstage”, near/far in Frost.
• When: remembered past, Yeats; past + ongoing present, Whitman.
• Who is speaking? Pronouns: I, we, they.
• Are there key terms (“home”) being evaluated and/or vocabularies of words grouped under related concepts (worth and value)?

These are questions to ask about a poem: if they seem boring/trivial OR too hard/confusing to answer, they might not be the most revealing questions about a given poem. But all are worth trying!

Shakespeare, William. “ Sonnet 18 ”, “ Sonnet 60 ”, “ Sonnet 65 .” Poetry Foundation.

Spenser, Edmund. “ Amoretti LXXV ”, “ Amoretti LXXXI .” Poetry Foundation.

Sidney, Philip. “ Astrophil and Stella 1 ”, “ Astrophil and Stella 31 .” Poetry Foundation.

Larkin, Philip. “ Sad Steps .” In Collected Poems . Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2004. ISBN: 9780374529208.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “ my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell .” In Selected Poems . Harper & Row, 1963. ISBN: 9780060909895.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “ the rites for Cousin Vit .” In The Norton Anthology of Poetry Fifth Edition . W.W. Norton and Company, 2005. ISBN: 9780393979206.

Johnson, James. “ Lift Every Voice and Sing .” In Complete Poems . Penguin Classics, 2000. ISBN: 9780374518172.

Bishop, Elizabeth. “ One Art .” In The Complete Poems 1926-1979 . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. ISBN: 9780374518172.

Collins, Martha. “ The Story We Know .”  Poetry . December, 1980.

Hayes, Terence. “ The Golden Shovel .” In Lighthead . Penguin Books, 2010. ISBN: 9780143116967.

Things to mark up/questions to ask when you read a poem (a running list):

This is an expansion of the questions in the first poetry analysis.

• Are there repetitions, exact (“cold dark deep and absolutely clear”) or with variation (“the squat pen rests [, snug as a gun.][. I’ll dig with it]”)? Pay attention to them!
• If the lines aren’t all the same number of syllables (aka, in a regular meter), does variation in line length correlate to anything in the poem?
• If there is (as in Moore, “The Fish,” e.g.), how do topics (and sometimes sentences) get distributed in and across stanzas?
• Think also about repeated patterns of syntax as contributing to rhythm (e.g., 3x “Adjective was the noun I verbed,” in Dunbar), and notice where these patterns of syntax change (as in the last line of that poem).
• Are there places that stand out as different, as in, the only end-stopped line or enjambment or caesuras?
• Or does the general “habit” of the poem (e.g., to end each line with punctuation) change at some point?
• Does the verb tense or mood shift (e.g. from past to present, from declarative—“I saw”—to conditional—“I would have seen”)?
• Where: “offstage”, near/far in Frost.
• Who is speaking and being spoken to or about? Pronouns: I, we, they, you (who?), one (so formal and impersonal!).

Questions to ask about a poem: if they seem boring/trivial OR too hard/confusing to answer, they might not be the most revealing questions about a given poem. But all are worth trying!

Punctuation Examples

[1] Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

[2] element bearable to no mortal,

[3] to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly

[4] I have seen here evening after evening.

Lines 1, 2, and 4 are end-stopped : they conclude with punctuation. Line 3 has a midline pause (any kind of punctuation): that’s a caesura . The sentence that begins after “…” continues across the line ending with no pause: that’s enjambment .

Shakespeare, William. “ Sonnet 12 .” Poetry Foundation.

Herbert, George. “ The Collar .” Poetry Foundation.

Stevens, Wallace. “ Poetry is a Destructive Force .” In The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens . Vintage, 2015.

Marvell, Andrew. “ The Mower to the Glow-worms .” Poetry Foundation.

Plath, Sylvia. “ Daddy ” and “ Morning Song .” In Collected Poems . Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2018.

This is a continuation of the previous two poetry analysis pages.

• Mise-en-scene: what does the writer make visibly present in the scene(s) of the poem? If you were to draw the poem, what would or could be shown in that drawing?
• Imagery: what is present in the language of the poem that would not be shown? (Things in the second category, present as concept, are “imagery”, or more exactly, “figurative language”). E.g.  “Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests, snug as a gun”: “finger,” “thumb,” and “pen” would be present in a visual representation of the poem, “gun” would not—it’s a simile.
• Literal language: love is a powerful emotion. Trimming rose bushes will produce more roses to pick.
• Similes are figures of comparison: a is like b, a is as x as b, etc.
• Metaphors are figures of identity: a is b. Or, I say “b,” meaning “a.”
• Assonance: same vowel sounds repeated. Br ee ze/wh ee l
• Consonance: same consonant sounds repeated (including inside words) br ight/ze br a
• Alliteration: repeated sounds at the beginning of words. br ight/ br eeze, ee l/ ea sy
• Chiasmus: repetition and reversal (can be applied to syllables, words and clauses as well as sounds). Br eez e/ ze br a
• Masculine rhyme: 1 vowel, or vowel + consonant. E.g.: b e /m e , br eeze /fr eeze
• Feminine rhyme: 2 syllables, - initial consonant). E.g.: br eezy / easy
• End-rhyme: words at the end of the line rhyme with the end of another nearby line.
• Internal rhyme: words anywhere in the line rhyme with words anywhere in another nearby line.

 Jess, Tyehimba.  Olio . Wave Books, 2016. pp. 12–29. ISBN: 9781940696201.

Things to mark as you read:

• Simile: the figure of speech that asserts a resemblance between two things that goes beyond their membership in a common class: “I was like a ship adrift on the ocean,” as distinct from “I am, like Arthur Bahr, a professor of Literature.” Generally signaled by “A is like B” or “A is as B.”
• Metaphor: the figure of speech that asserts identity between two non-identical things: “I am the walrus,” as distinct from “I am a professor.”
• Metonymy: the figure of speech that identifies a thing by a term closely related to it: “What does Building 14 think about instituting a requirement in computational thinking?” as distinct from, “What do faculty in GSL, CMS/W, and Literature think about…?”
• Synecdoche: the figure of speech that identifies a thing by naming something that is a smaller part of it

Our ordinary speech is full of metonymies and synecdoches, many of which are conventional to the point that they don’t stand out as non-literal, much less poetic. (Actually, the same is true for some metaphors: e.g., the “face” of a clock). So these may require some active attention to identify. Always a possibility, too, is that something literally described (e.g., Williams’ cat) may additionally function as a synecdoche for a larger class of things (e.g. agents in a narrative with a rising and falling trajectory). Tests of plausibility and explanatory value always apply—does a conjecture of this kind make better and more consistent sense of the poem? But the typical compression of (especially) shorter poems makes appealing the possibilities of layering literal (it’s a cat) and figurative (that cat typifies a larger class of agents) meanings in the same space.

The two parts of metaphor are generally designated as tenor , or thing meant (“I”), and vehicle , or thing identified with (“the walrus”). It can be useful to think about the larger domain from which the vehicle is drawn (the sea, the Arctic, creatures that swim, the natural world in general, things that are out of place in Kendall Square…).

Whitman, Walt. “ A March in the Ranks Hard-Pressed .” In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose . Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.

Harned, Thomas Biggs, and Walt Whitman. Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, 1847-Circa 1863 to 1864; Notebooks; Circa 1863 to 1864, Washington Hospital Notebook . 1863.

Whitman, Walt. “ The Artilleryman’s Vision .” In Leaves of Grass . Digireads, 2016.

Yeats, W.B. “ Easter 1916 .” In The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats . Digireads, 2018.

Frost, Robert. “ The Death of the Hired Man .” In North of Boston . CreateSpace, 2012.

• One of the macro features that distinguishes poem from prose is lineation—the text of the journal entry wraps across the whole page just as this text does, but the text of the poem is broken into lines. We should also think about—given that this poem isn’t generated using the metrical “rule” of a ten-syllable, five-beat lines (like “The Death of the Hired Man” is)—how does Whitman decide it’s time to end a line? Is it possible to identify and articulate the rules of the game he’s decided to work with in this poem? If you have an intuition, add it—but let’s also discuss in class.
• Old way: workers were compensated with room and board and a share of the harvest proceeds, so that they lived on the farm year-round, and were paid in case only once a year.
• New way: workers are paid “fixed wages” daily or weekly, and employment is more transient. Also pertinent: farm workers had been more like apprentices, learning the trade and saving up to become farmers themselves. This kind of upward mobility (“bettering” yourself) was sensitive to factors like declining prices for agricultural goods, increasing land prices, and increased mechanization of agriculture, which raised the cost associated with going from laborer to farmer.
• Read the Yeats poem commemorating an unsuccessful and violently punished uprising against British rule in Ireland (there’s a nice Poem Guide that gives helpful background). I’ve included it in part for contrast: the short lines and end-rhymes make it more obviously “poem-like.” My question for you: what do you think is the dominant rhythm of this poem, in terms of stressed/unstressed syllables? Can you single out a line that makes a good example? This question I’ll ask in class!

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “ my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell .” In Selected Poems . Harper & Row, 1963.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “ the rites for Cousin Vit .” In The Norton Anthology of Poetry Fifth Edition . W.W. Norton and Company, 2005.

You can see what it looks like if we assign color to the lines of a sonnet to show their end rhymes.

In other words, instead of writing the rhyme pattern as ABBA ABBA … (for instance), we can show it using different font colors:

When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent, To serve therewith my Maker, and present, My true account, lest he returning chide; “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed, And post o’er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Pick one author and one sonnet; copy the poem, and use color to indicate the rhyme scheme. Before class, look at all the sonnets to see what kinds of changes get rung on the form, and what kinds of line groups within the 14 line whole get defined by rhyme.

Milton, John. “ When I consider how my light is spent (Sonnet 19) .” John Milton Reading Room.

Dunbar, Paul. “ The Debt .” In The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar . CreateSpace, 2017. ISBN: 9781475157574. 

Frost, Robert. “ Acquainted with the Night .” In The Poetry of Robert Frost . Edited by Edward Lathem. Henry Hold & Company, 1969. ISBN: 9780805005028.

Gay, Ross. “ Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude .” In Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude . University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. ISBN: 9780822963318.

Kirsch, Adam. “ Professional Middle-Class Couple, 1927 .” Poetry . April, 2003.

Reading Exercises:

After picking out these readings, I realized that all of them (except for the Frost poem) all revolve around ideas of economy: what you owe others, what you are entitled to, what you can or can’t give back. (Not unrelated to “Death of the Hired Man,” actually).

A little background and clarification on the Milton sonnet, the oldest and also the most densely allusive of these readings: Milton writes this sonnet in mid-life. As a young man, he had formed the massively ambitious goal of writing in English a great epic poem comparable to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid—and later would achieve that goal with Paradise Lost. But at this point, he was middle-aged, had not yet produced the poem, and had lost his vision (like James Joyce, he produced his major work while blind)—thus, “this dark world,” in which “light [is] deny’d,” etc. Another thing to note: line 3 refers to the New Testament parable of the talents (reference given in the online text). “Talent,” in the parable, refers to a unit of money, and the parable concerns what you should properly do with money that has been given to you as a loan. Milton is also playing on the more contemporary meaning of “Talent” as giftedness. What are we obligated to give back, given our talents?

As ever, print out, read, and reread the poems, and bring your marked up copies to class; look particularly for the four things I’ve underlined below.

Another thing that changed when Old English met French/Latin was grammar. A quick and dirty explanation: when we write a sentence like “Jim kicks Jill,” it’s understood that Jim does the kicking (is the subject of the verb) and Jill is the target (is the direct object of the verb). There are all kinds of other rules for adding phrases and qualifiers around those core words, that we learn as we learn to speak. Some other languages do things differently. To show that a word is the direct object, instead of putting after the verb, these languages attach a tag to the word that says “direct object”—and then it can go anywhere. You could write “Jillen Jim kicks” and have it mean the same thing as our original sentence. Some of these case endings persist in pronouns (I/me, he/him), so you can say, “Him I don’t like.” Old English used word endings instead of word order to identify the parts of sentences.

However, in poetry you will see a lot of inverted word order—that’s something to look for both in untangling complicated sentences, and thinking about poetic technique. Syntax is one of the places where poets sometimes push at the boundaries of what language allows to be done while still remaining intelligible.

Another aspect of syntax to think about: delaying delivery of a word or key phrase can leave the whole meaning of the sentence in suspense, another useful effect. (Look for that in the Gay and Kirsch poems).

Two other things to look for in these readings: elision (when readers have to mentally supply words that are necessary for a sentence to be complete—Gay and, especially, Milton do this for concision); any patterns created using phrases (as distinct from patterns of sound or rhythm as such).

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Dimmed Lights, Bright Voices at Student Poetry Cafe

For the fourth annual poetry slam, seventh graders took turns reciting works by renowned American poets like Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Maya Angelou. Some students wandered the room as they delivered lines, punctuating phrases with dramatic gestures and emphatic pauses, transporting their audience with evocative imagery and thoughtful inflections. After each performance, classmates showed their appreciation with enthusiastic finger snaps.

The event challenged students to learn how to speak effectively in public. "Part of the poetry slam experience is getting over the fear of getting up in front of the class and realizing that they can do this," said English teacher Maureen Mullaney. "It's hard to stand before your peers, especially at this age. I'm impressed that they took on the challenge and flourished."

The poetry slam culminated weeks of study as students analyzed their selected poems, researched the author's background, and explored figurative language and meaning before memorizing their poems.

"They show each other support, too. When they return to their tables, you hear their friends whisper 'good job, good job,'" said Mullaney. "I love that they support each other and encourage each other to take their turn. It's peer pressure working positively."

"This assignment asked you to find your voice. One trick to doing that is to utilize someone else's words," said Superintendent Dr. Duncan Wilson, who addressed the students after joining the cafe audience. "Do not be afraid to have a voice and to keep finding that voice. The world needs another generation with a voice."

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Some teachers have found it helpful to introduce poets and poems for beginning and mid to advanced level students to imitate. This gives them the opportunity to read and discuss a poem, while at the same time generating their own poems. Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Unexpected Meeting” is a good example:

We are very polite to each other,

insist it’s nice meeting after all these years.

Our tigers drink milk.

Our hawks walk on the ground.

Our sharks drown in water.

Our wolves yawn in front of the open cage.

Our serpents have shaken off lightning,

monkeys---inspiration, peacocks---feathers.

The bats---long ago now---have flown out of our hair.

We fall silent in mid-phrase,

smiling beyond salvation.

have nothing to say.

Szymborska is famous for writing about particular objects and creatures that are neglected. Her work also tries to incorporate neglected feelings, and she is skeptical and ironic. J.D. McClatchy characterized the tone of her poetry as “detached sympathy.” Try to write a poem based on a very particular event, such as Szymborska’s poem about a reunion with friends. There is little that is particular about such a reunion, but the comical moment of “smiling beyond salvation,” and the idea that creatures are more articulate than humans, is very particular.

It is likely that Szymborska does not go around having these idiosyncratic thoughts all day, but in her poetry, she pays special attention to those thoughts that are nearly forgotten, or dismissed as trivial. Consider some thought or idea that you would ordinarily dismiss as random or trivial, and write a poem around it. Try to use the random or trivial thought to make a statement about life, human relations, or some other big topic.

The Brazilian poet Joao Cabral de Melo Neto is known for assimilating the style of pop song lyrics into his poems. He writes his own lyrics in a very abstract language. A good example is his poem “End of the World”:

At the end of the melancholy world

men read the newspapers.

Indifferent men eating oranges

that flame like the sun.

They gave me an apple to remind me

of death. I know that cities telegraph

asking for kerosene. The veil I saw flying

fell in the desert.

No one will write the final poem

about this private twelve o’clock world.

Instead of the last judgment, what worries me

is the final dream.

Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, unlike Wislawa Szymborska, doesn’t try to say anything about life or the world. He tries to bring poetry closer to what he considers its original form as song, and he thinks of his words as the material of song. Often in pop songs, the words are elliptical and don’t make much sense, but they resonate in a mysterious way. Write a poem that doesn’t make any logical sense or doesn’t add up to a final meaning; think about the way lyrics in pop songs suggest meaning without directly stating it or trying to explain it.

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174 IMAGES Poetry Book and Cafe by ReadingWritingandRockingIt Poetry Cafe! Poetry Café Activity Pack Poetry Cafe by rockinroom212 Figurative Language/Literary Devices POETRY cafe assignment! (CCSS aligned) Poetry Cafe by Letters from 4th Grade COMMENTS Figurative Language/Literary Devices POETRY cafe assignment ... Poetry Cafe is now an annual end-of-year tradition in my grade 7-9 English classrooms. It's Common Core aligned and fun to do. After teaching figurative language & literary devices, this is the ideal independent assignments for students to complete in about a week and present over the span of 1-2 days. Step by Step: Poetry Unit for Elementary Classrooms This poetry unit study was three weeks long. In week one, I taught seven Figurative Language elements. Week Two, I introduced poetry - poetic elements, studying poems, brainstorming poem topics, and we dipped our toes into writing poetry. Week Three, we dove into writing our own poems!! You can make this a short poetry unit, or a long one ... 5 Poetry Activities for Students in Grades 3 to 12 Blackout poetry is a good starting point for new poets because the words are already on the page and students only need to determine which words to use. This strategy can also be used as an interdisciplinary assignment in which students use text from specific content to create a poem about that content, such as using the Bill of Rights to ... K20 LEARN Poetry Cafe Sample Guidelines (attached; optional) Quick Write (attached; one per student) ... You might advance in the rigor of your assignment by limiting poetry choices. Display slide 17 and inform your students that they should now construct a poem with a format similar to that of their favorite songs. They can follow the same rhythm or ... 13 Poetry Lesson Plans For High School In this High School Poetry Packet, your students will read, study, and analyze six famous poems! Perfect for any Poetry Unit! This packet is a wonderful tool because you can have students complete the literary analysis questions in a variety of ways: whole-class, independently, or collaboratively. The 6 poems included in this packet are: High School Poetry Unit, 4 Weeks, Analysis + Fun Supplements, PDF ... • Poetry Cafe: A Spoken Word Experience activity plan, which includes detailed instructions on how to host your own student-led poetry reading, two examples of modern spoken word poets in action, and a student assignment sheet. • Close reading/historical connection activity to use with Walt Whitman's classic poem, "O Captain! My Captain!" DOC Poetry Cafe Poetry Café . For the past few weeks, we have been studying poetry. You have examined the rhythm and structure of poetry as well as many poetic devices including sensory images, alliteration, personification, repetition, and similes & metaphors. 2 Original Poems DUE by: Monday, May 2nd!!!!! Results for figurative language assignment After teaching figurative language & literary devices, this is the ideal independent assignments for students to complete in about a week and present over the span of 1-2 days. THIS POETRY CAFE PACKAGE INCLUDES: 1. Poetry Cafe assignment instructions + list of literary devices 2. Poetry Cafe assignment rubric 3. PDF An International Showcase of Student Expression and Achievement themselves) or published poetry (written by others). Although the specific formats and requirements will vary considerably across grade levels, courses, and assignments, one key feature will be universal: video uploading. The Poetry Café is designed to facilitate the sharing of creative student-made videos using Moodle as an online hosting ... Assignments Assignment: Informal Essay I. Session 4: Etymologies and Rhythms. Make a copy of the readings, mark them up, and bring with you to class next week. In the process, please glance at the poets' bios and make a note of where and when they lived and any key facts—just the basics! Assignment: Poetry Analysis I. Assignment: Etymologies and Rhythms Dimmed Lights, Bright Voices at Student Poetry Cafe The twinkling lights cast an intimate glow, adding to the cozy ambiance of this temporary poetry cafe at North Salem Middle/High School. Anticipation hung in the air, and a hush fell over the audience as a seventh-grader confidently stepped up to the podium. With a brief giggle, then a calming deep breath, the student locked eyes with the ... Sample Assignment J.D. McClatchy characterized the tone of her poetry as "detached sympathy." Try to write a poem based on a very particular event, such as Szymborska's poem about a reunion with friends. There is little that is particular about such a reunion, but the comical moment of "smiling beyond salvation," and the idea that creatures are more ... Poetry Cafe Invite Teaching Resources Browse poetry cafe invite resources on Teachers Pay Teachers, a marketplace trusted by millions of teachers for original educational resources. Best 30 Poetry Cafe in Moscow, PA with Reviews Poetry Cafe in Moscow on YP.com. See reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers and more for the best Coffee Shops in Moscow, PA. Best 17 Poetry Cafe in Moscow, ID with Reviews Poetry Cafe in Moscow on YP.com. See reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers and more for the best Coffee Shops in Moscow, ID. Results for SONNET GRADE 6 POETRY Poetry Cafe is now an annual end-of-year tradition in my grade 7-9 English classrooms. It's Common Core aligned and fun to do. After teaching figurative language & literary devices, this is the ideal independent assignments for students to complete in about a week and present over the span of 1-2 days. THIS POETRY CAFE PACKAGE INCLUDES: 1. THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW is a poem by Victor Hugo. ("Il neigeait.") {Bk. V. xiii., Nov. 25-30, 1852.} It snowed. A defeat was our conquest red! For once the...comments, analysis, and meaning The Retreat from Moscow Cafe Press. Selected Poetry of Victor Hugo The Retreat from Moscow from: Chatiments translated by: Toru Dutt. It snowed. A defeat was our conquest red ! For once the eagle was hanging its head. Sad days! the Emporer turned slowly his back ... assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis